Category: News

The following is an essay originally commissioned by a UK broadsheet in August 2022.

Woman? Very simple, say those who like simple answers: She is a womb, an ovary; she is a female: this word is enough to define her.

— Simone de Beauvoir

With a pamphlet entitled “Children, Idiots, Women, and Minors” (1868), the Victorian polemicist Frances Power Cobbe embarked on a campaign to persuade the emerging movement for women’s rights that any attempt to define women on biological grounds would lead to idealism and abstraction. “We must not fall into the absurdity of supposing that all women can be adapted to one single type, or that we can talk about “Women,” (always to be written with a capital W) as if the same characteristics were to be found in every individual species.”¹ Cobbe’s point was that the category “women” was a legal fiction, which empowered men to deprive a class of their fellow human beings of legal and civil rights. Like workers in Victorian factories, women may share little beyond their social rank––some, of course, may be slotted into patriarchy on the basis of their supposed fertility; while others could have been placed there to perform other kinds of reproductive labor. The connection between women was neither biological nor absolute, but derived from their position in society.

Cobbe’s idea was not uncontroversial at the time it was written. But by the end of the nineteenth century, it had become ubiquitous among women’s rights campaigners. Demands for women’s suffrage were rooted in the notion that “women” were not a naturally-occurring type, distinguishable from men on natural grounds, but simply a group of person that had been denied legal parity. Josephine Butler, an important early suffragist, wrote in 1869 that “the term ‘Women’ is a large and comprehensive one,” and argued that it is specifically in relation to work that the class that bears that title had come into being; accordingly, her collection of essays on the theme of women’s emancipation was not titled like John Stuart Mill’s rather grandiose The Subjection of Women, but in respect of the lives and labors of those whom Butler sought to uplift: Women’s Work and Women’s Culture.

In the post-war feminisms of the twentieth century, the notion that “women” was a social category, rather than a naturally-occurring type, became rather more fraught, not least because the institutionalization of evolutionary theory seemed to confirm that, though perhaps “man” and “woman” were social types, nonetheless “female” and “male” attributes were relatively similar across all mammalian species. So when Simone de Beauvoir famously argued that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” the object of her critique was not patriarchy, but biology. The following sentence reads: “No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society.” Beauvoir’s feminism depended on a refusal of the notion that different sex characteristics produced differently-sexed organisms, and that while biological traits could be sexed, whole people can’t in any reliable or comprehensive way.

The existence of heterogenetic gametes alone does not necessarily mean there are two distinct sexes; the differentiation of reproductive cells often does not bring about a division of the species into two types: both can belong to the same individual. This is true of hermaphroditic species, so common in plants, and also in many invertebrates, among which are the annulates and mollusks. Reproduction takes place either by self-fertilization or by cross- fertilization. Some biologists use this fact to claim the justification of the established order. They consider gonochorism—that is, the system in which the different gonads belong to distinct individuals—as an improvement on hermaphroditism, realized by evolution; others, by contrast, consider gonochorism primitive: for those biologists, hermaphroditism would thus be its degeneration. In any case, these notions of superiority of one system over another involve highly contestable theories concerning evolution. All that can be affirmed with certainty is that these two means of reproduction coexist in nature, that they both perpetuate species, and that the heterogeneity of both gametes and gonad-producing organisms seems to be accidental. The differentiation of individuals into males and females thus occurs as an irreducible and contingent fact.

So, according to Beauvoir, sex is differentiable at the scale of the cell, but since there exist organisms in which sex-cells of both sexes are found, we therefore cannot use the fact of sexual dimorphism as a basis for the sexual classification of individuals or groups. It is not that Beauvoir refuses to talk about female organisms altogether––she does so frequently––it is that such organisms are inferred, rather than emerging into the world fully-formed. “Assigned at birth,” if one likes––or before, or after. Femaleness “irreducible and contingent,” in Beauvoir’s beautiful, enigmatic phrase.

Beauvoir’s answer to the apparent problem of evolutionary biology was widely embraced by feminists in Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom, with some lesbian feminists going so far as to argue that the term “woman” was no longer relevant to feminist organizing; Monique Wittig, infamously, declared that “a lesbian is not a woman”––meaning that there was no basis, biological or social, on which those placed into sexual passivity and reproductive labor by compulsory heterosexuality could be said to share interests with lesbians, whose social roles are entirely different.

Towards the end of the century, a number of lesbian feminists looked to the emerging social norms of gay and lesbian communities to found new sexual and political taxonomies. Queer feminism, or queer theory, was developed on one front by lesbian feminists like Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin, and on the other by gay men like D. A. Miller and Leo Bersani: at its core was an attempt to displace the melancholia of heterosexuality from its position as the implied grounds of feminist organizing and community. If feminism was primarily about women’s work and heterosexual reproduction, what use was it to communities with no interest in having children, and in which biological sex was naturally no basis for the division of domestic labor. Judith Butler’s argument that biological sex was “discursive” translated into a psychoanalytic register what Beauvoir had pursued in terms of practical science; the pronouncement that a baby “is a boy,” for example, may be derived from a doctor’s observation of the baby’s sexual characteristics, but if one agrees with Beauvoir that sexual characteristics are no basis for designating the sex of an organism, than the doctor’s pronouncement, however consequential, is neither a natural nor an inevitable extrapolation of the data he (presumptively he) has observed.

Enter the gender critical activists. With the important exception of Julie Bindel, these are writers with relatively little training in feminist philosophy, but whose thought has become perhaps the dominant trend in contemporary British philosophy. Helen Joyce, a mathematics scholar who had a stint editing the finance pages of The Economist, embarks upon the reprint of her book Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality with the following words:

The arguments in this book are based on facts that until recently were universally accepted: that humans cannot change sex; that males are on average much stronger than females and commit nearly all violent and sexual crime.

An emphasis on the novelty of the position Joyce calls “gender self-identification” underpins much that follows. It is as though Joyce has wandered into a classroom during the penultimate lecture of the course, declared that feminist philosophy as such is garbage, demanded the right to deliver the final lecture herself, and inexplicably been granted it. The only novelty in any of these books is the novel fact that those demanding “sex-based rights”––the notion that civil rights should be apportioned differently to members of different sex classes, the idea that Frances Power Cobbe, Josephine Butler, Margaret Oliphant, Simone de Beauvoir, and Judith Butler have consistently stood against for seventeen decades––believe themselves to be feminists. But the word is taken. They aren’t.

The word “reality” crops up in Kathleen Stock’s subtitle, too: Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. A philosopher of literature, Stock’s first book Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation, and Imagination (2017) defends what she calls the principle of “extreme intentionalism”––the idea that a literary text means nothing more, less, or different from the intention of its author. Of course, it depends on what the word “means” means––an enthusiastic reader of French fiction, Stock knows that the French verb to mean, “vouloir dire,” translates literally as “to want to say.” But a sense that the Frenchies have been up to no good with the English language suffuses Stock’s critique of feminism, and slots Material Girls into the grand tradition of English critics of “postmodern” Gallic nonsense––heir not so much to Beauvoir, but to E. P. Thompson’s “The Poverty of Theory.”

For Stock too, the enemy of “reality” is “gender identity theory,” which she no more bothers to define than does Joyce. Still, it is novel (“in the first quarter of the twenty-first century––quite unexpectedly––a philosophical theory about something called ‘gender identity’ gripped public consciousness” [1]); it is “presented with a veneer of intellectual credibility” (7); and it is the object of “authoritarian, secretive attempts to railroad gender identity theory through parliaments” (8). Strange, given the ubiquity and ferocity of “gender identity theory,” that Stock cannot find a single philosophical source for this “philosophical idea.” The closest we get to a text worth disputing, of all things, is a pamphlet produced by the LGBT advocacy organization Stonewall––neither a governmental nor a scholarly entity––which argues that “a person’s innate sense of their own gender, whether male, female, or something else… may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth” (5). At other times, the object of Stock’s critique is “politicians, officials, and other public figures” (6), all unnamed, and the ungrateful brats from the Harry Potter movies “whose reputations were made in the films of [J. K.] Rowling’s books.”

But as becomes clear in the book’s “whistle-stop tour of big moments in the history of gender identity theory” (37), Stock’s actual argumentative opponent has a simpler name than that: it’s just feminism. She waves her hands to expelliarmus Beauvoir (“whether or not de Beauvoir actually intended the conceptual separation of being female from womanhood is moot. I don’t think she did.” [14]). Later, Stock assures us that “Beauvoir was fairly obviously talking only about females”––never mind that she appeared to say the exact opposite, that there is no such thing as “a female,” only female traits. Wittig warrants only a cheerful mystification of in intellectu and de re definitions of “Earth.” Judith Butler, of course, shows up only to “tell us gender is a performance”––a laughable misreading of Butler’s sense of the “performative” that snags many a first-year undergraduate, but should be within the grasp of the first philosopher since J. L. Austin to be entered into the Order of the British Empire. Other feminist texts––Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, the Yogyakarta Principles, blog posts by anti-transphobic feminists associated with the Michigan Womyn’s Musical Festival––are narrated en route to the unhappy present, when the notion that roughly half of all people simply are male and the rest are female seems, at long last, to have lost some of its self-evidence. That notion, of course, Stock does not deign to defend; neither does Joyce, nor Bindel. Why bother? The gender critical writers position themselves somewhere less like the child from “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and more like Barry Goldwater: in your heart, you know they’re men.

The comparison with Goldwater is probably less flattering than these authors would choose for themselves, but the real model for the gender critical writers is the George Orwell of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a fondness they share with the Trumpist internet. Joyce puts “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four” underneath an Audre Lorde quotation on the epigraph page of Trans. It’s a little odd to see him cast in the role of feminist, a role he certainly abjured, both in his stunningly sexist portrayal of women in his fiction (think of Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four), and everywhere else––several book-length feminist critiques of Orwell have been written over the years, including Daphne Patai’s The Orwell Mystique: A Study in Male Ideology, published, as it goes, in 1984. If there’s a kinship deeper than the preference for simple sums, it might derive from Orwell’s legendary hatred of femininity. In the years before composing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Eric Arthur Blair kept a column in the commonsensically leftish journal Tribune, where he would frequently deal with the woman question, arguing that “the Modern Girl has been just the same for quite 2,000 years,” and that “one of the big failures in human history has been the age-long attempt to stop women painting their faces.” Make-up bad, nail-polish worse: “it is very unusual to meet a man who does not think painting your fingernails scarlet is a disgusting habit, but hundreds of thousands of women go on doing it all the same.”

In these books, when “make-up” comes up, the word “stereotype” is not far behind. Bindel, in particular, seems very sure that people would only wear make-up if compelled to do so by the patriarchy (the inverse of Orwell’s argument, which is that patriarchy fails to prevent women adorning themselves):

In the early second wave, feminists were criticized for attacking women who wanted to wear make-up, get married, or who chose to stay home and raise a family. But feminists were not and are not attacking other women for what they choose. Rather, we are asking, ‘What are the forces that shape choices?’

There is certainly something rousing about Bindel’s refusal of the Hobson’s choice of neoliberal post-feminism. Her chapter on those vicious “trans activists” possesses a title that typifies the gender critical rhetoric, either Orwellian plainspokenness or Goldwaterian obfuscation, depending on your opinion: “Saying It As It Is.” The chapter begins, curiously, with a narrative in which nobody says it as it is, concerning Bindel planning a visit to a Kenyan village of Umoja, from which men have been banned, when her editor calls her and tells her that the villagers have asked her not to attend because of her transphobia. The punchline: “It took me a full ten seconds to work out he was joking.” Later, it turns out that another feminist pointed out to Bindel that “50 per cent of transgender people experience sexual violence in their lifetime and trans woman of color in particular face an increased risk of this form of violence.” Bindel’s not having it: she emails the editor who had called her to guffaw with him about, I suppose, the rape of Black trans women. Why on earth Bindel chose to recount this anecdote as though it were anything other than an act of spectacular, discrediting cruelty, I have no idea. Nor do I know whether Umoja excludes trans women from its community, and, if so, on what basis––karyotype, inspection of genitals, hunch, etc. But this is what passes for gutsiness. A few years before she wrote Material Girls, Kathleen Stock wrote a blog post entitled “When Bindels speak,” in which she revels in her colleague’s “vividly Rabelaisian” prose; or Germaine Greer’s, which feels “like a bucket of cold salt water has been chucked over me after days of humid air.”

These books do have feminist forebears, in a strain of anti-trans feminism that emerged alongside and within the radical feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. For those feminists, no concession to trans women’s claims of personhood was necessary or tolerable: when Robin Morgan denounced Beth Elliott at the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, she proclaimed her “an opportunist, an infiltrator, and a destroyer with the mentality of a rapist.” Conversely, Stock and Joyce go out of their way to insist upon “compassionate concessions that enable a suffering minority to live full lives, in safety and dignity” (Joyce, gag-inducing), and proclaim that “[trans people] deserve laws and policies that properly protect them from discrimination and violence” (Stock, pointedly refusing to explain what “discrimination” means). Still, these books seem unwilling to engage with, or even to acknowledge, the earlier generation of trans-exclusionary feminists. For Morgan and some other radical feminists, “woman” was a biological category; she would have signed off on Joyce’s statement that “sex is why women are oppressed, and gender is how women are oppressed.” (The notion that women are oppressed because of their sex, of course, contradicts left feminism’s treatment of women as a laboring class, and this distinction has remained controversial in debates between radical feminists and Marxist feminists.) Janice Raymond, infamously, wrote in 1979 that “the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence.” Does Stock agree? She writes “any philosophical critiques that do sometimes (rarely) emerge––especially by non-trans academics––are regularly treated as equivalent to actual attacks on trans people.” So why not cite Janice Raymond or Robin Morgan? The commitment to novelty, to asserting the uniquely “postmodern” dimension of a question that long precedes modernism, stands out as perhaps the most ruthlessly incompetent dimension of this work.

It’s perhaps a little unfair to group these texts together. Material Girls is the work of a competent and minimally introspective antifeminist philosopher; Trans is an unruly set of incoherent polemics by a finance journalist, by far the least persuasive of the three; Feminism for Women is a reactionary feminist’s cri de coeur. Yet one finds odd connections between them: Bindel and Stock both think that the word “gender” is used as a “polite” euphemism for “sex”, which is a weird idea; the scapegoating of Judith Butler for queer and lesbian feminism is ubiquitous, though only in Trans does one suspect that the philosopher’s Jewishness might be part of the author’s concern. Joyce, rather worryingly, blames the rise of “gender self-identification” on George Soros and other “wealthy people” who “have shaped the global agenda,” language that wouldn’t look out of place on the Daily Stormer. The source for Joyce’s claim appears to have been Jennifer Bilek, with whom Joyce has scheduled events and tweeted bibliographical recommendations, and who has approvingly cited a video by the neo-Nazi Keith Woods advancing an anti-Semitic theory of transness. Joyce denies that she is anti-Semitic, and has threatened legal action against those who have found anti-Semitic elements in Trans. (Full disclosure: I withdrew from a scheduled public debate with Helen Joyce after I learned that the host she had chosen for the event had published articles I considered anti-Semitic.)

One point on where the three books differ, though, is whether or not it is ever possible for trans women to pass as women. Joyce thinks it’s very rare: “very few trans people ‘pass’ as their desired sex.” (Citation needed, as they say online.) Bindel, fittingly for a feminist, is more concerned with what “passes as feminism” than with who passes as a woman. Trans women seem frequently to pass in Material Girls, though of course Stock is careful to note that the true postmodern weirdos seem not to want to, “in line with Judith Butler’s ideas about gender as performance.” If they can, of course, then in order to exclude them from public spaces, one would need a method for examining all women who show up at the shelter, the prison, or Umoja. And one would also need a firm sense of exactly what one was looking for: genitals, chromosomes, and gametes all have a claim on the gender critical Real.

Feminism, from Frances Power Cobbe to the present, has a different answer: gender abolitionism. Gender abolitionists haven’t cared what a woman is, who wants to be one, or why; they have argued against any and all legal discrimination between men and women. Yes, this would mean the end of gender recognition certificates, as well as many other elements of legal segregation that we take for granted. But it would better reflect the reality that scientists and feminists have been insisting on since the 1860s: that “men” and “women” are inferred from sexual characteristics, and that some of those traits are and can be changed. Reality does matter for feminism; this kind of metaphysics really, really doesn’t.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Katherine Hobbs for introducing me to Cobbe’s wonderfully engaging and complex feminism.

∿

A little less than a year ago, I accepted a Substack Pro deal for a significant amount of money to publish on this platform for a year. Today, I’m walking away from that contract and shutting down my account. I’ve exported the email addresses of everyone who has subscribed and will add everyone, for free, to whatever platform I decide to publish with next. I might also take a break from the newsletter hustle. I’m not sure, I’ll see how a couple of other things shake out. I’m proud of a lot of the writing I’ve put on this site, though, so while I’m going to be deleting everything from Substack, I’ve already uploaded everything from the last year to my own website.

I’ve never been under any illusions about why a literary scholar specializing in Victorian literature and psychoanalysis was offered a lot of money by a tech start-up. (A lot for me; obviously, pennies for them.) It’s because I’m a trans woman, and about a year ago, Substack was facing public criticism for its publication of a number of authors critical of the movement for trans civil rights. As it happened, I thought that the criticism often blurred an important difference: between libelous and hateful attacks on individuals on the one hand, and criticism of trans civil rights claims as a matter of public policy on the other. I thought, in other words, that it was important to acknowledge that, while I disagree with Jesse Singal’s work very profoundly, I don’t think it is strictly hateful; Graham Linehan’s activism, on the other hand, is very clearly motivated primarily and consistently by a lurid hatred of trans women, particularly those who love and have sex with other women.

I still think this distinction matters, and that it is captured fairly well by the Terms of Use that Substack publishes.

But I no longer have any faith that the executive team at Substack will enforce these Terms of Use, or the Content Guidelines.

So because I do not trust that the platform will enforce its own rules, I’m leaving.

However the term has been degraded by present use, I’m a passionate believer in free speech. In my view, trans people have a particularly intimate need for language as a vehicle for freedom: we, perhaps more than anyone else, are people whose fundamental sense of ourselves has depended on our ability to describe ourselves freely, even at profound personal cost. As a scholar and editor of scholars, I recognize the necessity of disagreement, plurality of opinion, and dissent. And someone who has been wrong many times, about many things, I’m particularly grateful to colleagues and interlocutors who have corrected me, sharpened my thinking, and jostled me closer to the truth, even when those jostles have also felt painful. I’ve taught classes at UC Berkeley defending free speech, worked closely with students whose political commitments profoundly contradicted my own, published essays on this subject many times, including on this newsletter. I have defended free speech in conversation with my own comrades, and I have helped to found an organization committed to Academic Freedom for All, a position I am planning to defend in a live debate with anti-trans campaigners in the UK. I care about freedom, and language, and the relationship between the two, more than anything else.

So it makes me worse than miserable—it makes me feel positively nauseated—to read shady corporate garbage like this pouring forth from those who’ve helped to pay my bills:

[A]s we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation. While we have content guidelines that allow us to protect the platform at the extremes, we will always view censorship as a last resort, because we believe open discourse is better for writers and better for society. 

Either deliberately or otherwise, this last sentence conspicuously equates the enforcement of “content guidelines” with censorship. That is, Hamish Mackenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj, who signed the letter, believe that their own injunctions against abuse and harassment would, if enforced, amount to censorship. I can’t continue to work with people who think that’s true—especially when I’ve personally explained to them, more than once, what’s wrong with it.

It’s important to understand why this isn’t true. People often think about this kind of online “abuse” only from the perspective of the abuser—someone who says cruel things, but who should be allowed to run his mouth off anyway because of his right to free speech. That’s fair enough at the scale of the individual. But it doesn’t work at the scale of the system. If abuse of a minority is allowed to continue unchecked, members of that minority will be excluded the system. Historically, this is why jurisdictions place controls on defamation and libel: to ensure equitable access to the public sphere.

But national jurisdictions are clearly incapable of performing that role in this case. For example, I’ve been advised by a number of lawyers that Linehan has libeled me, and that any court in the UK or the US would evaluate our dispute in my favor. The problem is that he lives in the UK, and I live in the US, so neither jurisdiction would hear the case. Our contention, such as it is, exists online, rather than in a national space—and so it is important that online regulators decide how they will ensure the same equity of access to the public sphere that the liberal rights-based framework of “free speech” had attempted, often very unsuccessfully, to supply.

What Substack has done instead is to deny any responsibility of this kind. The first time I told them that something Linehan had published about me was libelous, they responded by telling me that, of course, if I could convince a court of that, they would follow the court’s lead. I found that pathetically evasive at the time, and said so. But after a full year of grotesque personal libels, each more flagrantly in breach of the Terms of Use than the last, I now think it’s something more sinister than that. Substack acts like a corporation—and so it should, it is a corporation, and very clearly the commercial interest is in monetizing the angry centrists like Singal, Glenn Greenwald, and Bari Weiss. But it has decided to talk like a state, and present itself as the guarantor of rights that its corporate conduct, in fact, is fast eroding.

That’s why my decision to leave the company was made halfway through my trawl through this truly repulsive trail of managerial slime:

It is, of course, massively important to the angry centrists that their egos are flattered, and so they must be told again and again that they are the underdogs. But there is absolutely no need for the platform itself to keep up this pretense—except that it has decided to adorn its shabby commercial interest with gaudy moral nostrums. If the company itself has swallowed the notion that controlling for abuse and harassment is a form of “censorship,” then public regulation of these platforms has become a logical necessity. There’s a case for public ownership, in fact—because Substack are publicly deferring to legal domains that, in fact, do not bind them.

The argument, however, is not persuasive. Yesterday, Greenwald published one of his usual link-thick clause-bombardments, this time directed against Neil Young on the one hand, and the critics of his own platform on the other.. His argument concerning the nature of censorship eventually led him into this peroration:

None of this is to suggest that American liberals are the only political faction that succumbs to the strong temptations of censorships. Liberals often point to the growing fights over public school curricula and particularly the conservative campaign to exclude so-called Critical Race Theory from the public schools as proof that the American Right is also a pro-censorship faction. That is a poor example. Censorship is about what adults can hear, not what children are taught in public schools. Liberals crusaded for decades to have creationism banned from the public schools and largely succeeded, yet few would suggest this was an act of censorship. For the reason I just gave, I certainly would define it that way. Fights over what children should and should not be taught can have a censorship dimension but usually do not, precisely because limits and prohibitions in school curricula are inevitable.

Only one link here, to an article declaring victory against creationism, albeit one published in 1987, before the issue has even become a flashpoint in the culture wars. But Greenwald’s sloppiness with sources isn’t the problem—and he isn’t usually that sloppy, either. The problem is that his argument is completely impossible to follow. It seems to be something like:

1. Some would say that legislative efforts to ban critical race theory are censorious.
2. “That is a poor example.”
3. “Censorship is about what adults can hear, not what children are taught in public schools.” (One might have wished for a link to clarify that rather theatrical claim.)
4. Liberals successfully suppressed creationism, “yet few would suggest that was an act of censorship.”
5. But I, Glenn Greenwald, would define it that way.
6. Debates about what children should be taught are kinda-censorious, kinda-not.

It is difficult to escape from this paragraph without the strong sense that Greenwald sees “censorship” merely as that which “liberals” advocate—whether that is critical race theory or evolutionary theory—and that whatever “liberals” don’t like, is actually “free speech.” But to deploy a somewhat Greenwaldian rhetorical construction, the incoherence of his word salad is useful, in so far as it is instructive. This man doesn’t know what “censorship” is, and has simply aligned his political interests completely with those of his corporate employer.

I don’t advocate anyone else leaving the platform—the point remains, make that bread if you can. I’ve discussed this briefly with Danny, but not in great detail, and I don’t expect him to make the same decision. I hope this situation improves. Hamish could improve it, at a stroke, by committing to transparency in respect of complaints. Or Hamish could confirm, as I suspect, that no Substack account has ever been censured on the basis of a violation of the terms of use or content guidelines. Hamish, of course, will do neither of these things, because his strong corporate interest is to act like a corporation (secretively and exploitatively) and talk like a state (grandiose declaration of liberal values). I think that’s sad, as well as objectionable.

But for me, free speech is too important to leave to this sleazy group of millionaires. The stench here got too strong, and I’m leaving. Thanks to everyone who has supported this work––I will see you all around and about. My Twitter handle is @graceelavery; my Instagram handle is @grace.lavery.pangolin. See you all around, friends.

∿

Dear Joanne,

I want to begin by sharing my disgust with those––starting with The Sun––who have escalated misogynistic attacks upon you in the wake of your recent disclosures of opposition to the movement for trans civil rights. While I disagree with your position emphatically and unapologetically, and it is the primary purpose of this letter to explain the substance of that disagreement, it is beyond doubt that many people who believe themselves to be supporting trans women have targeted you unfairly. I join, then, with Roz Kaveney, Andrea Lawlor, and the dozens of other trans people who signed a letter of support for you after The Sun had published a story under the headline “I slapped JK and I’m not sorry” earlier this year. Such an alarming display of misogynist power gives the lie, in my view, to the notion that “terf” is, intrinsically, a sexist slander: at least, it was not one that The Sun had any need for, when it decided to exercise that power against you. 

I want also to name another point of agreement between us: as you explain in your oddly-titled essay “J. K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues,” our experiences are not the same. It is difficult to find much that I have in common with you––although, like someone quite close to you, I was a child from a lower-middle-class family who, at the age of 11, moved into a magical world of selective education, and gained access to social circles and cultural capital that nobody had heard of in the house in which I’d grown up. Like The Chosen One, I found that my being an outsider emanated a certain ambivalence, in me and in those around me: I found  it easy to hold people’s attention, though perhaps not as easy as the hero of Hogwarts. Still, partly because of the psychic consequences of those experiences, and partly for their ramifications across an entire social domain, I cannot romanticize selective education, nor the Government Assisted Place scheme upon which the ward of Dursley would have depended had he been admitted to King Edward’s School, Birmingham. 

The remainder of this letter, which concerns civility––indeed, has been written in order to endorse and uphold the noble goal of discursive civility to which you have committed yourself––must, I am afraid, make clear what I take to be very serious errors of judgment in your handling of this matter. In some cases, those errors of judgment stem from errors of fact. You write early on, for example, that your absorption into your present circumstances was occasioned by tweeting your “support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets.” Although the single quotation marks around “transphobic” make clear that you are not quoting from anywhere, it isn’t clear to this reader, at least, whether you believe the tweets in question to deserve that description––my inference is that you do not. 

You go on to describe Forstater’s tweets as part of “a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology.” In fact, the clause might indicate either of three things: either (1) a belief that sex as determined by biology is protected in law, (2) a belief that sex is determined by biology as protected in law, or (3) whether “a belief that sex is determined by biology” is protected in law (the question in the latter case being whether such a belief would be protected in law becauseit was right, or simply because it is a belief, and beliefs are protected in law). The question of whether law or biology comes first, a position on which is quite difficult to extract from your sentence as published, is of course the central question of the very debates in feminist philosophy (in the work of, for example, Catherine McKinnon and Judith Butler) that the current “gender critical feminists” either have not read, or act as though they have not read. 

Still, one thing is eminently clear: neither of these “beliefs,” whether or not they could be attributed to Maya Forstater, adequately describes either the letter or the spirit of the tweets for which her contract was not renewed, and which were primarily at issue in her claim against the Center for Global Development, decided against her in November 2019. The full decision, including the texts of the tweet, has been uploaded to Snopes, the website for debunking online misinformation, since Forstater herself (and now you) have been responsible for such grotesque distortions of it. In particular, I would call your attention to the tweet cited in the decision in §34.2, in which Forstater quote-tweeted, with approval, an article entitled “Pronouns Are Rohypnol”: 

We may save ourselves the usual fruitless debate over whether a retweet constitutes an endorsement, since in this case Forstater has made it clear what is her view of “Pronouns Are Rohypnol”: it is an “important article.” Now, you are perhaps free to think that this alarming analogy is not “transphobic,” but in that case I suspect you would find yourself in the minority. Perhaps you think that, despite being transphobic, it should not be grounds for contract non-renewal: on this point, you might find broader agreement. But you certainly cannot think, unless you happen not to have read the Forstater decision, that the tweets for which her contract was non-renewed were anything to do with “a philosophical belief.” They were abusive tweets, quite simply meant to shock, hurt, and frighten women. 

It will appear unseemly to dwell on the vicious online behavior of one troll––albeit a troll who seems to have had the dubious privilege of radicalizing the wealthiest writer in the world, possibly in history. But it is the central importance of “pronouns are rohypnol” to the ongoing “debate” (I do quote you: “the debate around the concept of gender identity”) can hardly be overstated. The apparent meaning of the phrase, which is indeed the one developed in the essay “Pronouns Are Rohypnol” by Barra Kerr, published on the Fair Play for Women website: basically, that when trans people ask others to refer to us by particular pronouns––and more specifically, when trans women do so––we are, in essence, disarming people of their power to fight us off. “Rohypnol,” then, because trans women are analogous to rapists: all we want is to gain sexual intimacy with women by force––this, the “gender critical” team has it, is the compulsive condition called “autogynephilia.” And pronouns are one among many techniques with which trans women may carry out our work of silencing dissent, the better to prey on unsuspecting women. 

This plain sense of “Pronouns Are Rohypnol,” of course, rather gives the lie to the notion that trans people are uniquely rude or cruel in our participation in what you call the “debate” over our civil rights. Indeed, I think trans civil rights activists should not be discredited on the basis of occasionally sharp words, mostly from teenagers. Believe me, I have also been called cunt and bitch––and addition, I have also been called rapist, in that case by the person you have made it your vocation to defend. And explicitly pedophile, by Graham Linehan, one of the primary signatories of another recent letter in support of you, and by his many defenders, enablers, and excusers, including Jane Clare Jones––who still, I believe, does events with Linehan––and Kathleen Stock, who, after initially having the courage stand up to his ludicrous bullying, and call libel by its name, eventually said she regretted his having been expelled from Twitter for it because, after all, it was just a little rough-housing. Unlike you, Joanne, I have access to neither billions of pounds to comfort and protect me, nor the telephone numbers of the British Establishment from whom I might expect a letter of public support. When the creator of Father Ted publicly accuses me of “grooming” my own students at UC Berkeley, on the basis of my having expressed concern for LGBTQ students currently living at home in perhaps unsupportive families, I have no defense open to me––a beloved former mentor, who knows thankfully little about this whole mess, wrote to me to express concern about Linehan’s accusation, assuming that a person of his eminence would not identify smoke were there not also fire. So I sympathize––indeed, if you will forgive my use of the forbidden verb, I identify––with the “millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.”

You will notice, Joanne, that I have not yet addressed the apparent substance of your essay: the “philosophical belief” you impute to Maya Forstater that “sex is determined by biology.” You flesh out this argument a little later:

I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive.

Since you don’t say which arguments you’ve read (all of them?) I can hardly respond in detail: indeed, a significant part of my point here is that the supposed philosophical debate that is being silenced (concerning the meanings of something called “biological sex”) is both less censored, and much less interesting, than advertised. It is difficult to know how best to respond to the above bluster––perhaps by attempting to distinguish, as Judith Butler has so conscientiously done, between the body as a material object; the body as it presents itself to consciousness; the body as it is “sexed,” to use your passive construction (which, I take it, indeed derives from Butler); the body as its biological features are assigned particular kinds of taxonomic significance and legibility; the unpredictable effects and distinctions of those meanings as they change over time. Discriminations of this kind are usually necessary to any philosophical analysis of sex (not gender) in both analytical and Continental philosophical traditions: one can hardly characterize a body of knowledge that stretches back over a century, and has shaped the thoughts of millions upon millions of women, as “misogynist,” without sounding a little like one of those politicians who confesses himself sick of “experts.” 

Less useful as scholarship than as ideology––as the mark of how a certain social class understands itself and represents itself at this moment in history––“J. K. Rowling Writes” is indispensable. It perfectly depicts a dishonest and insecure oligarchy, desperate to control access into its own terrains and repel invaders at the border. Though its author may have felt otherwise, “J. K. Rowling Writes” is the document of the Brexit era: a text that could rival the present Prime Minister for evasiveness, philosophically incoherence, and a liability to cover up felt intellectual inadequacy with bluff, unfunny jokes: “a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).”

I want to conclude with a contention of my own, for which I have no more evidence than a hunch and a few dozen conversations and anecdotes shared with my friends and allies in the LGBTQ community against whom, for whatever reason, you have declared war. We mostly don’t care whether “trans women are women,” and we have many positions on that. We mostly don’t care whether femaleness resides in the sexed body, or what “femaleness” is, or what “the sexed body” is, or what it means for a property to “reside” in a predicated object. We simply don’t believe you when you claim not to be transphobic, not because of these positions, but because of your failure to notice that your apparently blameless movement of frustrated common-sensers, has been infiltrated at every level by the kind of vicious, hostile bigots whose entire business is to defame and degrade the lives of trans women. From Maya Forstater to Graham Linehan, through the Heritage Foundation to WoLF, you have failed to address the hatred in your own ranks, and it is for that reason, and nothing to do with your banal opinions, that you must be called to account. 

         Best wishes,

         Grace Lavery

∿